LingLunch : Timothée Bernard

Timothée Bernard (Université Paris Cité)
Paradoxes and the content of sentences

Our thesis is that a certain class of paradoxes about truth and falsity originates in the confusion between two sentences with the same content. According to us, the Liar ("This sentence is false"), for instance, is neither true nor false. In virtue of what the Liar states, it then seems to be false, but this appearance, however, should not be taken at face value. We defend the claim that it is in fact another sentence with the same content that is false. This proposal is formalised with a variant of propositional logic; its semantics relies on definitions, i.e. the association of a formula to a propositional letter. A sentence is then modelled as a propositional letter, with the sentence’s content being modelled by the letter’s associated formula.